Rome's Lost Son (15 page)

‘I didn’t persuade Paelignus to do anything; I just suggested things. However, that piss-poor little army, as you term it, has just done more for Tryphaena’s cause than if she had ten legions
of her own. When Parthia invades and overruns Tigranocerta and then moves north to take Artaxata, Rome will be obliged to send in the legions, no doubt under Corbulo’s command.’

‘Great, so what?’

‘So who will be leading the Armenian resistance and allied with our legions?’

Understanding began to spread over Magnus’ face. ‘Radamistus,’ he said slowly. ‘And then when it’s all over in three or four years’ time and Parthia has withdrawn, Radamistus stays as king because he was our ally and the fact that he murdered Mithridates will be conveniently forgotten.’

‘Precisely.’

‘And Nero, her other kinsman, will be emperor by that time and earn the glory of a Parthian defeat.’

‘And will no doubt be voted the name Parthaticus by the Senate, myself amongst them, after celebrating his Triumph.’

‘And meanwhile a whole lot more people like that girl we saw earlier are going to suffer.’

Vespasian shrugged as they clattered down a staircase of ancient oak. ‘I don’t like it any more than you, but what can I do? I’m trapped. I’m meant to be working for Pallas in order to help him protect himself from Agrippina and then I’m also meant to be working for Narcissus in order to help him bring down Agrippina; but I end up working for Tryphaena who’s trying to secure Agrippina as the mother of the next emperor because she has persuaded me that whatever Agrippina might think of me, Nero is my best chance of advancement.’

‘Nero?’

‘Yes; and having listened to her arguments, I agreed with her, but not for all the reasons that she put forward, although some of them were very persuasive.’

‘How would Nero becoming emperor possibly help you?’

Vespasian pushed open the main door that led out to the town’s agora; smoke stung his eyes and caught in his throat. The carnage still continued, although with less vigour than before as most of the population had by now either fled or been despatched. ‘That’s hard to say in logical terms because it’s really just a hunch
– but a very strong one based upon the auspices of a sacrifice that I made. Let me put it into your vernacular: judging by the way that he makes free with his own mother, I think that Nero’s got more chance than Britannicus of fucking up on a fucking large scale.’

CHAPTER VIII

E
VEN THOUGH ITS
walls were not intact, Tigranocerta was impressive, cascading down a high foothill of the Masius range. Framed by snow-capped peaks soaring up behind it, the city was built in concentric squares, each one higher than the last until the hill’s summit was crowned with a royal palace of Caligulan proportions. It had been founded by King Tigranes the Great, over a hundred years before when Armenia was at the height of its power. It lay on the western bank of the Tigris, opposite the river’s confluence with one of its tributaries, the Kentrites. It had been built to guard the Royal Road as it followed the eastern bank of the Tigris through the narrow Sapphe Bezabde pass in the Masius range; the road then bridged the Kentrites and then swung west, carrying on its journey to the Aegean Sea. However, an army could leave the road before the bridge and follow the Kentrites north into the heartland of Armenia. To guard against incursions from his larger but more fractured neighbour, the Seleucid Kingdom, Tigranes had built two further bridges connecting Tigranocerta with the road, both across the Tigris: one to the east bank before the river reached its confluence with the Kentrites and making its ninety-degree turn to the west, and one after the bend to the north bank. Strategically this forced any invading Seleucid force to take both bridges and then the city itself if it wished to proceed without a constant threat to its one supply line through the Sapphe Bezabde pass. The inevitable lengthy process of the siege gave Tigranes time to assemble his army and march south to repel the Seleucid invaders. But that vestige of Alexander’s empire had been ripped apart by Rome and Parthia, and since the rise of those two superpowers Tigranocerta had changed hands many times, occupied both by
Rome and Parthia until the most recent settlement, which had handed it back to Armenia on condition that its defences remained in ruins. That condition was now being broken, much to the relief of its reduced population.

‘Paelignus complained to me this morning about his precious troops being used for what he terms “slaves’ work”,’ Vespasian said as he and Magnus made a tour of the works on the fifth day after their arrival. Auxiliaries worked shoulder to shoulder with all able-bodied male citizens while the women and children kept their menfolk supplied with food and water.

‘Just goes to show how little he knows about soldiering,’ Magnus said through a half-chewed mouthful of onion. ‘What did you say to him?’

‘I suggested to him that he should address his complaint to the commanding officer and pointed out that of all people he was the person most likely to get a fair hearing.’

Magnus laughed, spraying onion over the calves of a kneeling auxiliary shaping stone with a hand-pick. The man turned round, invective ready on his lips, but it stayed there and died when he saw who was responsible. Since the sack of Amida, ten days previously, Vespasian and Magnus had become objects of curiosity to the auxiliaries. It was known that Vespasian had prevented Paelignus from giving the men two days’ rest – one of the centurions gossiping, he assumed – and it was also known that he had recommended some executions to help bring the men back into line; over twenty had lost their lives. This had made Vespasian someone to fear: a man who ostensibly held no command and yet could order death and countermand their commander. Being auxiliaries raised in Cappadocia, none of them recognised Vespasian from Rome where his time as consul, admittedly for only two months, had made him a familiar face in the Forum Romanum, but not here in the southern foothills of the Masius mountains between the Tigris and the Euphrates. So the rank and file did not know Vespasian’s identity and the officers, if they did, kept it to themselves, having been warned to do so.

However, the auxiliaries had more pressing concerns than the identity of the man in their midst with the power of life and
death: why were they fortifying a city in order to wait behind its reconstructed walls for a Parthian army that was rumoured to be heading their way and would surely outnumber the small Roman force by tens of thousands? But that question was not answered as their centurions and optiones bullied them and their civilian co-workers into working harder, faster and longer, hauling stones, shaping stones, lifting stones, placing stones and doing just about anything with stones that could be conceived even by the most imaginative of centurions.

In five days the four thousand men of the five cohorts and roughly the equivalent number of citizens had repaired most of the large gaps in the two-mile wall to a tolerable standard and it once again stood twenty feet high continuously around the entire city. Now the men were working on the lesser damage in the hope that they could bring the defences up to a state of near-perfection so that the host coming up from the south would break upon the walls when it arrived.

‘Then he said,’ Vespasian continued, ‘that we should at least reduce the number of hours spent repairing the defences every day from twelve to six.’

Magnus looked up to the royal palace that dominated the whole city. ‘So Paelignus is still trying to make himself popular with the men? It’s beyond me why he bothers. None of them is ever going to show that hunchback any respect more than is due to his rank. The way he tries to buy their favour is by slackening their discipline, which, of course, will make them into weaker, sloppier soldiers; and they’re the sort that generally end up dead. Who wants to be popular with dead men?’

‘Quite. I think that if I hadn’t been here, Paelignus would have four thousand very drunk and surly men with which to defend Tigranocerta from the Parthians.’

Magnus knotted his brow, puzzled. ‘From what I can make out, if you weren’t here then none of us would be. And I’m still trying to work out why we’re here anyway.’

Vespasian stopped and looked out to the south, shading his eyes from the midday sun, down the length of the Sapphe Bezabde pass with the Tigris glinting at its base, the Royal Road
coupled to its eastern bank; at its far end, thirty or so miles away, the pass opened up into the Parthian satrapy of Adiabene in what had once been Assyria. ‘We’re here because we want the Parthians to attack us; whoever heard of a war without someone attacking someone else?’

‘Yes, but why do we want the Parthians to attack us? And if we do then why didn’t we bring enough men to make a decent fight out of it?’

‘We don’t want a decent fight. In a decent fight lots of men are liable to be killed.’

‘Oh, so fewer of our lads will get killed if we’re outnumbered ten to one than if we had even numbers; is that what you’re saying?’

‘It is indeed.’

‘Then you evidently know less about soldiering than Paelignus.’

‘That’s about to be tested,’ Vespasian said very slowly as his eyes narrowed.

Magnus followed his gaze south to the horizon and then after a few moments he too saw what had taken his friend’s concentration. ‘Fuck me!’

‘I think that we’re all going to be far too busy to take you up on that very kind offer.’ Vespasian did not look away from the dust cloud smudging the horizon.

‘I think you’re probably right,’ Magnus agreed, his eyes also fixed on the brown smear that stained the clear blue sky.

They both stood still staring into the distance because, even though it was thirty or forty miles away, they could tell that the cloud was not caused by a herd of cattle or a trading caravan; no, it was far too big for that, far too big for a legion or even two. This was the dust cloud caused by an army of magnitude.

The Parthians had come; and they had come in force.

‘We should leave immediately!’ Julius Paelignus squawked, recoiling, as if he had been punched, at the sight of the approaching horde.

‘And go where?’ Vespasian asked. ‘Even though they’re still two days away they would catch us out in the open if they were
so minded. And I’m sure they would be; their cavalry can move a lot faster than our infantry. We’re safer in here; heavy cavalry are useless in a siege no matter how many they’ve got and their light horse archers will only shoot arrows at us from a distance. As for their infantry, they’ll be mainly conscripts who’re treated not much better than slaves and would rather be anywhere but here.’

Paelignus looked up at Vespasian, his eyes blinking rapidly as if there were specks of dirt in both of them. ‘But they’ll swarm all over us.’

‘How? We’ve got ample men to man the walls now that they’re rebuilt. Their numbers mean little to us. In fact their numbers aid us.’

Paelignus scoffed. ‘Aid us?’

‘Of course, Paelignus. How are they going to feed that massive army, eh? The crops haven’t even sprouted; they won’t be able to stay here for more than half a moon. Now, I suggest you use the time before they arrive to send out foraging parties and get everything edible within a ten-mile radius and bring it within the walls. And also check that all the cisterns are full.’

‘I still think we should leave.’

‘And I suggest that you stay – if you want to live, that is.’

Paelignus’ gaze flicked across the faces of his prefects, each with a wealth of experience of fighting in the East, and each nodded their agreement with Vespasian’s assessment of the situation. ‘Very well; we prepare for a siege. Prefects, send out foraging parties; as many men as we can spare from the final work on the walls. And have the city council round up anyone with suspect pro-Parthian or anti-Roman sentiments.’

‘That’s a very wise decision, procurator,’ Vespasian said without any hint of irony.

Two days later the entire length of the Sapphe Bezabde pass was filled with men and horses; but this huge host was not a dark shadow on the landscape but, rather, a riot of gay colours. Vivid hues of every shade adorned both man and beast as if all were competing to be the most garish in an army where conspicuousness was equated with personal prowess. Banners of strange
animal designs fluttered throughout the multitude adding yet more colour and giving Vespasian, who had seen the apparel of many different peoples’ armies in his time, the impression that here was a culture totally alien to him.

The auxiliaries, drab in contrast to the arriving foe, lined the walls of Tigranocerta in regimented ranks of russet tunics and burnished chain mail, their expressions dour and fixed as they watched a party of a dozen or so horsemen cross the east–west bridge and then pick their way gently up the hill towards the main gate under a branch of truce. Each rider had a slave scrambling to keep up with him, holding a large parasol over his master’s head even though the sun had yet to pierce the cloud cover.

Vespasian stood next to Magnus with Paelignus and his prefects on the wall above the gates as the delegation halted a stone’s throw away: a line of bearded men, nobles, on fabulously caparisoned steeds, the richness of which was outdone by the dress of the riders. Brooches of great value, precious stones set in worked gold, fastened vibrant cloaks edged with silver thread over tunics decorated with rich embroidery that would have taken a skilled slave months to achieve. Trousers of contrasting colours were tucked into calf-length boots of red or dun leather that seemed as supple as the skin they protected. Dark eyes stared out solemnly from beneath dyed or hennaed brows that matched the curled and pointed beards protruding from each chin. The delegation’s lavish appearance was topped, literally, with flamboyant headgear littered with pearls and amber and then laced with gold thread.

‘He can’t just rush out of bed every morning,’ Magnus muttered as one man, even more elaborately dressed than his companions, his beard a bright red, kicked his horse forward to address the waiting garrison.

‘I am Babak,’ the noble called out in fluent Greek, ‘the satrap of Nineveh; the eyes, ears and voice of King Izates bar Monobazus of Adiabene, loyal vassal of Vologases, Great King of all the Kings of the Parthian Empire. To whom do I address myself?’

Paelignus puffed up his pigeon chest and stepped forward and then glanced involuntarily at Vespasian, who nodded his assent.

‘I, Julius Paelignus, Cappadocia procurator, commanding here,’ Paelignus shouted in appalling Greek. ‘What want you, Babak, Nineveh of satrap?’

If Babak was surprised by the standard of Paelignus’ Greek he was far too well mannered to show it; Vespasian now understood why the procurator had addressed his troops in Latin.

Babak indicated the rebuilt walls. ‘The tidings that were brought to me were not unfounded.’

Paelignus looked momentarily confused as he tried to translate in his head; then his eyes brightened. ‘What news to bring found you?’

Babak frowned and then held up his hand for silence as his fellow nobles began muttering amongst themselves. ‘I bring no news, Paelignus, just a request: dismantle what you have rebuilt and return to Cappadocia with your lives.’

This was evidently far too advanced for Paelignus and, as he struggled with the meaning, Vespasian walked forward to take over the negotiations before there was a calamitous error of translation. ‘Honoured Babak, satrap of Nineveh, I can speak for all here without fear of misunderstanding. We are here to safeguard the border of the Emperor’s client kingdom of Armenia while a state of uncertainty prevails.’

‘You have rebuilt the walls of Tigranocerta; there is no uncertainty about that. Equally, there is no uncertainty that that is in direct contravention of the treaty that we have between us. I must ask you to undo what you have done and leave.’

‘And if we do, Babak, will you too leave with your army or will you stay to impose your master’s will on this country and bind it closer to Parthia?’

‘Although my master Izates has recently embraced Judaism, I remain a follower of Assur, the rightful god of Assyria, and continue to fight
hitu
, the False, with
kettu
, the Truth. I will not dishonour either the Lord Assur, myself or you, Roman, with a lie; no, we will not leave. We will garrison Tigranocerta and then move on to Artaxata where we will remove this Radamistus and replace him with Tiridates, the younger brother of the King of Kings, Vologases, as he himself has commanded.’

Vespasian smiled inwardly, impressed by Tryphaena’s accurate prediction of events. ‘I thank you for your honesty, Babak. I am sure that you will understand our position: if you will not leave then we cannot do so either; not until honour has been satisfied. However, Babak, we will not cast the first javelin nor release the first arrow.’